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During the 70s, this gifted performer appeared as a clever, witty, and appealingly charming performer. She grew into a recognisable star on each side of the ocean thanks to the hugely popular English program Upstairs, Downstairs, which was the Downton Abbey of its day.

Her role was Sarah, a spirited yet sensitive servant with a questionable history. Sarah had a romance with the handsome chauffeur Thomas the chauffeur, portrayed by Collins’s actual spouse, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a television couple that viewers cherished, continuing into spin-off series like the Thomas and Sarah series and No, Honestly.

The Peak of Excellence: Shirley Valentine

However, the pinnacle of her career arrived on the cinema as Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing journey opened the door for subsequent successes like the Calendar Girls film and the Mamma Mia movies. It was a buoyant, comical, optimistic story with a superb character for a seasoned performer, broaching the subject of feminine sensuality that was not limited by conventional views about demure youth.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine foreshadowed the emerging discussion about midlife changes and women who won’t resign themselves to being overlooked.

Starting in Theater to Film

It started from Collins taking on the lead role of a her career in the writer Willy Russell's 1986 stage play: Shirley Valentine, the yearning and unanticipatedly erotic everywoman heroine of an getaway middle-aged story.

She was hailed as the toast of the West End and New York's Broadway and was then victoriously selected in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This largely mirrored the similar path from play to movie of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

Collins’s Shirley is a realistic scouse housewife who is tired with existence in her forties in a boring, lacking creativity country with monotonous, unimaginative folk. So when she wins the possibility at a no-cost trip in the Greek islands, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the boring UK tourist she’s accompanied by – remains once it’s finished to live the genuine culture away from the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic fling with the mischievous native, the character Costas, portrayed with an striking facial hair and accent by Tom Conti.

Cheeky, sharing Shirley is always addressing the audience to tell us what she’s feeling. It received big laughs in theaters all over the Britain when Costas tells her that he adores her body marks and she says to the audience: “Aren’t men full of shit?”

Later Career

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a active professional life on the theater and on television, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there seemed not to be a author in the caliber of Willy Russell who could give her a true main character.

She was in director Roland Joffé's adequate Calcutta-set film, City of Joy, in the year 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in filmmaker Bruce Beresford's the film Paradise Road in 1997. In Rodrigo García’s transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins went back, in a way, to the class-divided setting in which she played a servant-level maid.

But she found herself often chosen in dismissive and cloying older-age stories about seniors, which were unfitting for her skills, such as care-home dramas like the film Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film the movie The Time of Their Lives with Joan Collins.

A Brief Return in Comedy

Woody Allen offered her a genuine humorous part (although a minor role) in his You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant referenced by the title.

But in the movies, her performance as Shirley gave her a tremendous time to shine.